Chapter 2

The Influence of Natural Science on Biblical Interpretation

Modern science did not suddenly spring into existence, nor, once it had established itself, did it suddenly revolutionize people's thinking about the world. Yet in the long run, Western culture has been revolutionized by the impact of science. In fact, in some respects we are still embedded in a continuing process of cultural revolution. How then do we understand what science is, and how do we assess its bearing on the way that we interpret the Bible?

We should first ask whether science ought to have any influence at all on how we interpret the Bible. Biblical interpretation went on its own way, and prospered, even before modern science was in existence. Couldn't biblical interpretation simply continue without interaction with science?

But people cannot help making comparisons between science and biblical interpretation. The triumphs of science have proved impressive, whereas the history of biblical interpretation does not look so impressive by comparison. Physical sciences succeed in making accurate predictions. They provide integrated explanations of diverse phenomena on the basis of powerful but "simple" general principles or laws. They provide a framework for producing a continuous stream of new machines and technological innovations, increasingly useful and powerful.

The success of science and technology, even by the late eighteenth century, made intellectuals pay attention. Not only did science provide knowledge about the world; it was generating an ever increasing amount of knowledge. By contrast, medieval and Reformational theological debates seemed to go on and on, without ever reaching a definitive conclusion. But science moved forward irreversibly. It had become not merely a body of knowledge but an engine for manufacturing more knowledge, deeper knowledge, and more solidly verified knowledge.

It is no wonder, then, that people tried to learn lessons from science. They looked especially to the physical sciences (physics, astronomy, chemistry; later, geology and biology), where the triumphs took place the earliest and have been the most thorough.¹ At least three different kinds of lessons were drawn from nineteenth century science. The lessons differed depending on what people looked at.

6. Using specific scientific theories to test the truth of the Bible

First of all, some people compared specific scientific theories with views that theology had derived from the Bible, a procedure we may call evaluation using specific theories. The debates over Darwin's theory of evolution were the most notable case. Earlier, thinkers had debated whether the biblical descriptions of the sun's "motion" were compatible with the sun-centered astronomy of Copernicus.

Debates over specific questions of fact are certainly important in their own right. But it is not our purpose to take up such matters in this book. We should only note briefly that people responded in a variety of ways. Some people (e.g., agnostics, atheists, and some deists) decided that cases of apparent conflict between the Bible and modern science were irresolvable. Since such people viewed science as the wave of the future, they repudiated biblical religion. Orthodox antievolutionists, however, decided that the scientific theory in question was dubious and poorly supported. Theological liberals, for their part, decided that the Bible was scientifically primitive and needed to be updated theologically. Finally, conservative theistic evolutionists thought that they could reexegete crucial biblical passages and show that the Bible did not intend to teach anything in conflict with the new theories.²

How do we assess this use of science? How and when do we need to use the content of a specific scientific theory as a guide for our lives? The specific theories of physical science represent impressive intellectual triumphs and provide valuable insight into the workings of the world. But they concern us more broadly only when they touch on a specific question of human values. Average people are interested in enjoying the results of technology, but few are interested in the underlying scientific theories for their own sake. They are interested in a scientific theory only if it appears to suggest answers to the meaning of their lives. Likewise, people are interested in whether the Bible is true, because such a question affects their lives vitally. Hence they ask whether science confirms or disconfirms the truthfulness of the Bible.

Not much within the physical sciences, however, could conceivably either contradict or confirm the Bible. Even when there is some apparent contradiction, it is often easy to show that a better interpretation of the scientific theory or a better interpretation of the Bible obviates the problem. The scientific theory holds only if things continue as they ordinarily are, that is, if we exclude exceptional cases of God's dealing with the world, such as miracles. On the other side, the Bible's description of the sun's rising and of the creation of the world can be shown to be ordinary language, the language of appearances, rather than technical scientific description.

Specific scientific theories do affect biblical interpretation at least to the extent that they become the occasion for reassessing the interpretation of a few passages (Gen. 1-2; 6-8). In the light of scientific claims we return to the passages to reassess whether they implied all the scientific conclusions that we have drawn from them. Likewise, biblical interpretation affects science at the very least by leading us to reassess whether all the conclusions drawn from a scientific theory are warranted, or in some cases to ask whether the theory as a whole is suspect.

Such observations do not solve all the difficulties. But they considerably narrow the scope of those that are left. The remaining difficulties must be dealt with on a technical level, by refining our scientific knowledge and refining our understanding of the Bible until we can see that they agree.³

7. Building a world view on the basis of scientific results

Besides comparing specific scientific theories with specific passages of the Bible, people drew lessons from science in a second way. They produced whole world views by extrapolating from the picture presented by physical science. Let us call this process the procedure of building a world view.

People extrapolated world views from science because physical science seemed to offer the beginnings of a whole world view, an explanation of how the whole world fit together and of the role of human beings in it. If scientific knowledge was superior to theological knowledge in its accuracy and indisputability, perhaps it was also superior in providing a platform for a total explanation. Newtonian science, in particular, offered us a world consisting of massive particles interacting with one another by means of forces calculable from physical measurements of distance, orientation, velocity, and the like. Some people did not hesitate to draw the conclusion: the world was a mechanistic world of particles and forces, nothing more. There was no room for God's intervention, for chance, or for human free will. Newton's theory was thereby converted into a world view, namely, the view that the world was a mechanistic, deterministic collection of particles in motion.⁴

Though Darwin's theory of evolution has already been considered as a case of using a specific scientific theory, it was also used as the platform for a world view. "Social Darwinism" extrapolated Darwin's claims about survival, fitness, and evolution into the area of human social interaction.⁵ Even those who did not go all the way into social Darwinism often saw Darwin's theory as a complete explanation of life--an explanation that eliminated God. Of course, Darwin's theory could be narrowly construed as a technical scientific hypothesis for explaining the fossil record and the existing distribution of species. But the cultural atmosphere made it convenient to invoke the theory in support of much broader conclusions. Many people, for religious, philosophical, and ethical reasons, wanted to legitimize a naturalistic view of the world. Darwin, by eliminating the need for miracles in the origin of life, gave crucial support to these philosophical longings.⁶

How do we evaluate these efforts? Do physical sciences provide us with a world view? Does this world view agree with the world view offered in the Bible? To a certain extent, one might say that science and the Bible both provide us with only pieces of a world view. The Bible here and there provides information touching on scientific questions, but it does not answer all our questions about the way in which the physical world functions. Conversely, physical science, understood soberly and modestly, does not answer questions about human values and destiny, nor does it give information on supernatural acts which may be an exception to God's normal government of the world.⁷

But many people did not remain content with these limitations. They boldly extrapolated from physical science to comprehensive world views, deriving mechanistic determinism from Newton and the naturalistic world of evolutionism from Darwin. Such world views, because they pretended to offer a total explanation, competed with the Bible's claims. They did not simply contradict a single passage of the Bible, as a specific scientific theory might. Rather, they contradicted the Bible globally, by offering an alternative world view, an alternative set of values, and an alternative explanation of origins and destiny.⁸

This second use of science (as as a platform for a world view) is thus even more significant theologically than the first. It offers deeper challenges and potentially more destructive conclusions because it can threaten biblical religion as a whole. Nevertheless, it is not our purpose to pursue this difficulty. The most adequate answers are to be found in writings on Christian approaches to science. A number of Evangelicals have put forward ways of integrating the scientific task as a whole into a biblical world view.⁹

8. Building an epistemology on the basis of scientific method:

the example of Kant

Finally, science was used in a third way, namely, as a source of insight about the nature of knowledge itself. Let us call this approach the procedure of building an epistemology, or a philosophical theory of knowledge.

This third way is in many respects the most promising. As we observed, the procedure of using specific scientific theories is useful only when a specific theory happens to touch on issues of human concern. Most of the time it does not. The procedure of building a world view is questionable, since one must extrapolate science beyond what has been verified. On the other hand, the procedure of building an epistemology relies on the undoubted success of science as a means for producing knowledge. Even if science does not include all knowledge, its success surely contains lessons that apply to all knowledge.

The classic example of using science as a platform for epistemology is to be found in Immanuel Kant.¹⁰ Kant at an early point in his life followed the rationalistic, deductivistic approach of Leibniz. In opposition to this rationalism Hume defended an empiricism that started with pure events and did not assume that they were connected, merely that they sometimes occurred together. As Kant testified, Hume "awakened him from his dogmatic slumber." Kant then rejected rationalism. He was convinced that there was no guarantee that phenomena would turn out to be connected in the way that a rationalist supposed. And yet Hume's own empiricist solution was also inadequate. Hume's world contained no intrinsic connection between individual events. Hence Hume could not account for the reliability of scientific knowledge. The rationalistic approach of Leibniz did not lead to fruitful science either.

Kant therefore endeavored to provide an epistemology that was adequate to science and that also preserved room for religion. Kant accepted the obvious fact that science did provide knowledge. Kant's task was then to provide an epistemology that accounted for the success of science. Science arose from a combination of empirical data (Hume's concern) and rational inference (Leibniz's concern). An adequate epistemology would do justice to both these elements.

Kant's solution was to say that, whatever we observed empirically, we observed necessarily in terms of categories presupposed by the human mind. Inner experience (experience even within one's mind, without looking at the world) was necessarily experience against the background of time. Outer experience was necessarily experience in a framework of both time and space. To these categories of time and space one could also add the categories of quantity and causality, which are basic to physics. The empirical element in science was accounted for, since human experience was experience of a world outside that was not always predictable. On the other hand, the rational element in science was accounted for, since human experience necessarily conformed to the preestablished categories of the mind. The world of phenomena was not pure confusion, as Hume had it. Rather, it was necessarily a world of time, space, and causality, and this was the foundation for sure knowledge.

On the surface, Kant's solution seems attractive. In fact, however, a closer examination shows that it provides both too little and too much for the needs of physical science.¹¹ On the one hand, it provides too little. Suppose we agree that it shows the necessity of conceiving the world in terms of the categories of time, space, causality, and quantity. This result still does not constitute scientific knowledge, nor is it an adequate basis for guaranteeing that we can obtain scientific knowledge.

After all, any particular physical theory, such as Newton's laws, Boyle's law, or Dalton's law, furnishes predictions to the effect that the world will behave in one way, not another way, within the general framework of time, space, and causality. To say that there are causal connections (Kant) is not yet to say what kind of causal connections there are (Newton). To say that everything has a cause (Kant) is a long way from saying that all bodies attract one another with a force given by the formula F=GmM/r\S2\s (Newton). Kant's epistemology guarantees only that there is necessarily a cause for any event. It does not allow anyone to say that the cause must necessarily be what Newton says it is. In fact, in Kant's scheme the particular way that the world is, within the conceptual framework of causality, is ultimately not predictable. It is contingent. The phenomena presuppose things in themselves that cannot be predicted beforehand. A tightly formulated general law, like Newton's, predicts something that Kant says cannot be predicted. Hence Kant still cannot explain why a simple formula like F=GmM/r\S2\s should hold true all the time, while other formulas do not.

Second, Kant's epistemology provides too much for the needs of science. Namely, it dictates to science assumptions that may not turn out to be factually correct. Kant's categories of time, space, and causality are most naturally understood as actually implying a particular theory of physical time, space, and causality. In Kant's environment, these categories seemed to imply a linear absolute time scale, Euclidean space, and determinism in the realm of physical causes. These things were virtually part of people's intuitions about space, time, and causality. These intuitions or views of time, space, and causality were compatible with Newton's theory of gravitation, and so people were content with them at the time.

In the light of better scientific knowledge, however, physicists today are not willing to agree with Kant. Physicists now realize that the ideas of absolute time, Euclidean space, and determinism were all assumptions about the world that might be either true or false, not presuppositions that were necessarily true. Kant did not take into account two facts. First, the psychic experience of time, space, and causality by the ordinary person is not the same as the time, space, and causality that may be most suitable to physical theory. Intuitions derived from psychic experiences may or may not be immediately useful in physical theory. Second, intuitions themselves can be reformed. In Kant's time "space" meant Euclidean space. Given a line and a point not on the line, one and only one line could be drawn through the point, parallel to the first line. But modern physicists, confronted with coherent alternatives to this scheme, have had their intuitions changed. For them it is not obvious (in fact, it is false) that physical space is Euclidean.

Kant's solution, then, did not really correspond well with the nature of science. It did not even fit the specifics of Newtonian science. And it fitted even less well the developments of the twentieth century that were destined to supersede Newton. But Kant's philosophy had enormous impact nonetheless. It was accepted because of its promise in the field of philosophy rather than because of its accuracy in the realm of science.

For Kant, in fact, epistemology became the basis for philosophy as a whole. By means of his reflection on the categories of the human mind Kant specified what could and could not be the object of knowledge. And this pronouncement virtually determined what could and could not be part of the world. From Kant until the twentieth century, epistemology has been the key to philosophy as a whole. Hence Kant's work was not just an epistemology. It was a full-blown philosophy. It provided its own world view.

In Kant, then, epistemology leads to a world view. Hence we cannot rigidly separate the third use of science (building an epistemology) from the second use (building a world view). Epistemology is a part of a world view, and in post-Kantian philosophy often it is the principal part. Nevertheless, a rough and ready distinction between these two ways of using science is useful. The second use wants to read off a world view directly from the picture of the physical world presented in current scientific theory. The third use, the more philosophical use followed by Kant, wishes to reflect primarily on how scientists know what they know, rather than on what they know. From this reflection it derives general conclusions about the nature of human knowledge, and from there it derives further conclusions about what there is to know. (See figure 1.)

Kant provides us with a cautionary lesson here. When we seek to derive from science an epistemology or a world view, we may produce a world view that in fact does not really match science but that may be heavily motivated by philosophical and religious needs.

9. Baconian and positivistic understanding of science

Not everyone followed Kant, however. The scientists, perhaps, followed him least of all. Alongside Kant and his followers there continued a longstanding empirical tradition going back to Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon and scientists after him assumed that science studied the real world. Science did not just study "phenomena" in a Kantian sense; it did not just observe a world whose order derived from the categories of the human mind already read into it in the act of perception. The world was "out there," and scientists had the task of discovering its laws.

Scientists also assumed that the world was regular and had its laws. Hume's philosophical skepticism made him doubt whether there were real laws. But practicing scientists ignored Hume's theoretical problem. The laws were there. People could discover them by a series of steps laid out by Bacon. The steps came to be known as the scientific method.

1. Gather data.
2. Formulate a general rule (hypothesis) accounting for the data.
3. Derive predictions from the hypothesis.
4. Check the predictions by making experiments.
5. If the predictions prove true, give the hypothesis the status of a (tentative) law. Laws are always subject to further testing.
6. If a prediction proves false, return to step 1 and attempt to derive another hypothesis.¹²

As we shall see in the next chapter, these steps are not an adequate representation of how scientists actually proceed. The six steps are only an idealization. They leave out some crucial aspects of scientific research. But until about 1962, most scientists and philosophers of science thought that scientific progress occurred in this manner. And, in truth, the above six steps are close enough to the truth to enable people for a long time to ignore the discrepancies. For the sake of clarity, we will call the six steps the Baconian scientific method.

Baconian scientific method, then, does not match what scientists actually do. But until recently it did match what nearly everyone, scientists and nonscientists, thought that the scientists were doing (or ought to be doing). Moreover, there was no doubt that science produced impressive results. Hence the conclusion was not far behind: Baconian scientific method was the preferred instrument for producing impressive results.

It was attractive to try to assimilate the practice of biblical interpretation to the practice (or supposed practice) of science. One important area of this assimilation was historical reconstruction.¹³ Biblical interpretation involves a lot of historical work. Accurate grammatical-historical interpretation involves assessing the historical environment in which biblical books were written, determining the human authors and original readers of each book, understanding relevant cultural and geographical information, and so on. Historical reconstruction cannot be an exact science, but it can benefit from some of the methodological care exercised in the natural sciences. Hence Baconian scientific method was applied.

Some adjustments were clearly necessary. Historical reconstruction is concerned with single events in the past rather than a general law (see step 2). But one can still formulate hypotheses about a past event. One cannot perform experiments on history in the same way that one can perform experiments on frogs. But checking one's hypothesis for consistency with data not originally included could serve as a substitute for experimental confirmation in step 4.

The application of Baconian method to historical investigation seemed reasonable. But the development of the historical-critical method showed that it was not always innocent. The historical-critical method assumed, just as scientists supposedly assumed, that the same laws governed the past, present, and future. It assumed, as scientists supposedly did also, that tight causal laws governed the sequence of events.¹⁴ Historical research conducted on this basis already assumed that the miraculous was impossible. At this point, something out of the mechanism of post-Newtonian science, or out of the rationalistic world view of the Enlightenment, slipped into the very methods of research in biblical study. And having slipped into the methods, it naturally dictated the conclusions.

One qualification to this picture is necessary. The historical-critical method took its clue not so much directly from natural science as from the general intellectual developments of the Enlightenment and the refinement of standards for intellectual research of all kinds. But these general intellectual developments were in turn influenced by the example of science. In one way or another the natural sciences influenced biblical studies.

Of course, the historical-critical method, with its naturalistic assumptions, was not the only way to do historical research. Orthodox theologians and biblical scholars continued to believe in the supernatural. They believed that the world was governed by God for rational purposes. This believf provided a basis for historical research just as much as did belief that the world was governed by rational laws untouched by God.

In addition to the controversy over the canons for historical research, the Baconian ideal had an influence on biblical interpretation and on theology. Biblical scholars were interested in making their own work more rigorous. It was easy to say that theology had to become scientific, and it did so by following the Baconian scientific method. Charles Hodge, for example, lays out what he considers to be proper method in theology by explicitly invoking the analogy of scientific method.¹⁵ The individual texts of the Bible are the data, which the theologian/"scientist" uses inductively to formulate principles in the form of general doctrinal truths. The principles are to be checked for their consistency with the whole Bible.

Baconian scientific method had its effect even on people who did not consciously endeavor to assimilate their work to the methods and standards of science. The method presupposed a certain relation between data, hypotheses, scientific laws, and the sciences that codified the laws into coherent wholes. Underlying the Baconian method were the following assumptions.

1. Data are hard facts, about which there is and can be no dispute.
2. Hypotheses arise from seeing a pattern in the data and making an inductive generalization. The generalization says simply that all cases fit the observed pattern. Seeing a pattern is an act of insight that cannot be perfectly controlled, but once a pattern is seen, the generalization follows.
3. Predictions from a hypothesis are derived by simple deduction from the hypothesis itself.
4. Discarding or retaining a hypothesis is a relatively simply matter, depending merely on whether the additional experimental data support it.
5. Confirmed hypotheses are added to the existing list of general laws. Progress in science consists in piecemeal additions to the list of known laws.

These assumptions summarize the heart of an inductive, positivist view of scientific knowledge. According to this view, knowledge has two parts--individual bits of hard data, which are the indisputable basis for knowledge, and general laws, which are its superstructure. Each law summarizes a pattern found inductively in the data. The laws group together the data that they generalize. But except for the grouping of data under laws, all of knowledge is fundamentally atomistic. Each bit of data stands on its own feet, and each law in the existing list of laws stands on its own feet over against other laws.

Moreover, it could also be said that scientific method has two parts. In the inductive part, one gathers data and generalizes to hypotheses. In the deductive part, one derives predictions and discards disconfirmed hypotheses. The production of hypotheses cannot be completely mechanized, but all the other steps are in principle purely objective.

The above assumptions represent only simplified summary, but do express an important tendency in thinking about science. And this tendency has also infected exegesis and theology. In exegesis, this view of knowledge says that the individual words and morphemes are the hard data. The statements about the meaning of paragraphs and discourses are the laws. Hypotheses about meaning are discarded when they do not agree with some of the data (i.e., when they do not account for some word, phrase, or sentence). Progress in exegesis means adding to the store of correct interpretations of individual passages.

In systematic theology, individual passages of the Bible are the data, and the laws are general theological truths. Theological hypotheses are discarded when some passage contradicts them. Progress in theology means adding to the store of general truths derived from the Bible.

Both in natural science and in biblical interpretation, this inductive view of knowledge is inadequate. Worse, it leads to distortions and hindrances in the progress of knowledge. To see why, we will first look at the revisions that have taken place in the understanding of scientific method (chap. 3). We will then ask what implications we can draw for biblical interpretation (chap. 4-11).